What We Teach Students

Dr. Hymers emphasizes the importance of studying and getting good grades in every service. Students are handed the following points on how to make good grades and encouraged to follow each point. Most of our congregation are either students or have a college degree.

HOW TO STUDY AND HOW TO TAKE A TEST

by Dr. C. L. Cagan

After a class, go alone and study right away. Don’t go to Starbucks, or to fool around. Go to a quiet place immediately after class and study. Read and read again. Avoid distractions such as television, video games, sports, music, or radio. That is recreation; but do not let it crowd out your study time. Those things will eat up your time. Then you will find yourself studying all night before a test, and not do well in the class. Do not have music or television going on in the background when you study.

Go to the library or another quiet place to study. Do not study in a dorm, a school cafeteria, or a coffee shop such as Starbucks.

Try to take notes in outline form – with the major points of a lecture labeled as I, II and so on; then the smaller points indented under them. It will be easier to review and organize later. Have a separate notebook, or section in your binder, for each class.

When you study, stop and walk a little every hour or so. This will clear your mind. Then go back to studying.

Rotate your studying from one subject to another. Read and study on one subject, then walk a few minutes, then study another subject. If one subject is much harder than another in its homework or study material, do that one first, not last. Your mind will be fresher.

Always study alone. Never study in a group. Never study with friends or as a date. You will not learn much. Instead you will be distracted by the people you are with, and spend more time talking than studying.

Repetition is the mother of learning. Read and study over and over again. Study your material until you are bored with it and don’t like reading it, because you know it as well as you know your name. Then study it some more.

The night before a test, study the material over and over again until right before you go to sleep. Don’t do anything else, or read anything else, between the time you stop studying and the time you go to sleep. Let the last thing in your mind be what you studied.

The morning of the test, read and refresh what you studied.

Do not start studying the day of the test, or study fresh material before the test that day. You will be able to refresh what you studied before that day, but you will not be able to learn on the day of the test itself.

When you take a test, budget your time carefully. Always do the easiest questions first, even if they are way down in the test manuscript. Then you will have time to come back and work on the harder questions. If you spend a lot of time on a hard question, you will be in time trouble later and not be able to do well on the others.

When you take a test, do not become anxious or think of what you cannot do. Instead, decide that you are going to do your very best and face the test like a man or a woman. You will do your best if you think that way.